The other side of the robotics coin is called "augmented reality". AR is
about providing people with more (or more relevant) information than what
their senses naturally produce, generally in some highly specific context.
An AR system might be used to guide a surgeon's hand, coach a repairman,
superimpose radar data over a pilot's view, guide a taxi driver through
an unfamiliar neighborhood, help a fireman locate the safest path through
a burning building, or help an unskilled worker accomplish a complicated
assembly task.

Why Robots?

Despite recent developments with both Honda and Sony showing seemingly
production-ready humanoid robots, practically speaking, and especially in
the near term, robotics is primarily about replacing materials, energy,
and effort (time, attention, and frustration) with machine intelligence.

Take a look at modern agriculture. Fields are tilled, planted, harvested
and tilled again by giant machines that are best adapted to uniform crops
grown on uniform soil. The reason? The existence of such machines has made
older, slower, more attentive methods uneconomic, not because it costs
more to run smaller machinery longer, but because it means more man-hours,
which either adds to the cost in the case of hired labor, or limits the
amount of land one can manage, for those who do the work themselves. What
gets lost, along with terraces, waterways, and hedgerows, which encumber
the huge machines, is something that used to be called "the footsteps of
the farmer" -- another way of saying attention to detail. With a greater
number of smaller, slower machines that are able to operate independently,
the amount of attention given to each patch of ground can be dramatically
increased, while at the same time much of the fuel used can be replaced
with less concentrated, renewable sources -- the sun and the wind.

With six billion people on the planet, it might be difficult to argue that
there aren't enough to go around, and it might seem like we really
shouldn't be worrying ourselves about automating tasks people could do
while many still remain unemployed. But what if those tasks aren't worth
enough, in the market, to subsidize hiring people to do them? Robots will
eventually be able to fill the gap between what might just as well be left
undone and what the market deems important enough to pay people to do.

What is Robotics?

Robotics includes a lot more than machines that move around like and
interact with humans. Most robots are task-specific and possess
processing power, but, for the present, no intelligence beyond what's
codified into their programming. Some are quite simple, mechanically, and
not particularly expensive to build. (In fact some, called "bots", aren't
mechanical at all, but exist purely as software.)

A robot is essentially a system with some means for gathering information
about its environment, which it then utilizes to modify its behavior.
Robots typically have some sort of sensory apparatus, and one or more
processors that 'make sense of' the sensory input and run programs which
are contingent upon it. The term for the general study of this kind of
arrangement, including natural as well as artificial systems, is
"cybernetics".

Emerging Technology, Economies of Scale, and Synergistic Returns

Computers just keep getting more powerful, cheaper, or both. Capabilities,
like machine vision, which only a few years ago were the stuff of well
financed research labs, are now within the reach of mass market computers,
and will likely soon become available as plug-in parts. As the power/cost
ratio of robotic systems increases, the range of applications for which
they are cost effective broadens, increasing the size of the market and
driving down the per unit cost of development, lowering the price, which
further broadens the market.

With a larger market, it becomes reasonable to mass produce parts which
would otherwise be custom, thus dramatically lowering their cost and
still further broadening the market.

At some point the process of manufacturing itself becomes streamlined, if
not entirely automated, making many niche applications practical. This
would be about the time that the whole scenario goes ballistic...or, more
realistically, becomes bound not by technology nor by the costs of
production, but by more fundamental socio-economic constraints.

Following this logic is a fairly simple matter, what isn't so obvious is
that it holds the potential for a qualitative transformation of the human
environment, for the better. If robotics fails to live up to that
potential, it won't because the technology doesn't lend itself to that end
(it does), but because the inertia of wasteful, destructive habits was too
great to overcome.